Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  ‘Well, she was a grown up,’ said Tara. ‘And she liked a drink, didn’t she?’

  ‘If she had been drinking after work, surely it would be more natural for her to have had a companion.’ Chess wriggled straighter in her chair. ‘And here’s another question. Debbie was found under the second bridge. She must have taken a detour along the creek to get there. I mean maybe she would do that if she had a friend and they were talking or something, but it’s a funny thing to do alone. Why didn’t she go straight across to the church?’

  I didn’t want to join in, but I thought she was making too much of this. ‘So probably there was someone,’ I said. ‘And they were just too freaked by it to come forward.’

  Chess said, ‘There was no trace of anyone else.’

  I couldn’t help sounding surprised. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I asked one of the policemen, the young, nice one. He probably wasn’t supposed to tell me but he did. The police inspected the bakery as soon as we’d reported the body — early on Sunday afternoon. The phone was still off the hook. They found one glass in the back with only Debbie’s prints. And they found the champagne bottle in the bin with no prints on it at all. It had been washed very thoroughly. According to the Weatheralls, that wasn’t unusual for Debbie. She was fanatically clean. That was why they employed her. The policeman thought she must’ve drunk it all by herself and then washed the bottle.’ Chess frowned. ‘But I think it’s strange. She might have rinsed it to put it in the recycling, but she wouldn’t have been so thorough. I don’t believe it.’

  She looked around us all, demanding that we agree. Wando just kept shaving off slivers of cheese and shoving them into his mouth. Tara swirled her mug around watching the surface of the tea.

  Chess said, ‘I think there was someone else there, and they carefully washed away all their fingerprints.’

  I was the only one to meet Chess’s eyes and I tried without speaking to make her drop it.

  But Chess started staring at Wando. She was collecting information, adding to her Wando-file, instead of trying to be a friend. It would’ve been getting on Wando’s nerves, but Chess didn’t see that. This is normal for her. She thinks life is like chess. To her we are all just little wooden pieces moving around, making patterns and ruled by logic. She makes no allowance for what might be going on inside. That just isn’t part of the game.

  She went on, ‘The police kept asking me if I’d seen the necklace she had on. The yellow stone on the chain. Did they ask everyone?’

  Tara and Wando weren’t going to answer. It dawned on me that they both looked weird, kind of tense. I remembered how Wando had been when he’d seen the necklace on Debbie. The necklace had meant something to him. He knew more about this than we did and he didn’t want to go into it.

  Chess’s voice was hard and clear, trying to force us to listen. ‘Apparently it’s missing and the family want it back. That’s also peculiar. I don’t see how she could have lost that all by herself.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll never know exactly what happened,’ said Mum.

  Without realising he was doing it, Wando dragged one of Mum’s flowers out of the vase and started mashing it between his fingers.

  Chess said, ‘But just say there was someone else there, drinking with Debbie after work. It has to be considered. Maybe that person …’

  There was a pause. Even Chess wasn’t game to say what we were all thinking. Maybe that person pushed her in.

  She finished weakly. ‘Accidents and suicide aren’t the only ways of dying.’

  Mum interrupted. ‘Chess, I really think —’

  Tara stood up. ‘We’d better get going.’

  ‘Tara,’ said Mum. ‘Come and talk. Any time.’

  Mum was giving Tara one of her looks. There was some major undercurrent here but I couldn’t work it out. I cursed Chess for scaring them away.

  Tara said, ‘Thanks for the tea, Sarah. But we said we’d be home by three, didn’t we Wando?’ Their parents would be eating together at one of their houses.

  Wando grunted something and stood up, dropping his mangled daisy on the cheese. They thanked Mum and left.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ said Chess.

  I wondered too.

  Mum wasn’t really listening. She watched the back door where they had gone, but her eyes were a bit out of focus.

  ‘They’ve been through so much. Those two and the Wilsons. This has brought it all back up again.’

  ‘You mean that Devastation Road thing?’ I said.

  Mum’s gaze cleared as if she suddenly realised what she was saying. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘The what?’ said Chess.

  ‘It’s something that happened —’

  ‘Another time.’ Mum put a restraining hand on my arm. ‘We should wait.’

  ‘But what’s it got to do with Tara and Wando?’

  Mum shook her head. ‘They may tell you about it one day, but they won’t do it until they’re ready.’ She stared into my eyes. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere. Chess was watching us the way she’d watched Wando, collecting data and storing it away.

  As an excuse for looking down, I poured some water into my empty mug and guzzled it down.

  Mum said, ‘What about you two?’

  Chess was deep in thought and didn’t answer, so I had to. ‘What about us?’

  ‘Are you OK? About Deb?’

  ‘Fine thanks.’ Chess picked up some mugs and bolted for the kitchen.

  Mum’s eyes met mine again. It was always hard to get Chess to talk about things that were bugging her.

  Mum said, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Mum had been pretty solid today. I wished I had something to tell her. But I hated the way she did this. I folded my arms as a kind of protection against her and tried to think up something to say.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I thought about Debbie all the time. But somehow it didn’t affect me that much. It felt almost as if it hadn’t got anything to do with me. Like a news story. You watch it and go ‘How terrible, pass the sauce.’ The only thing I felt was sometimes I was a bit sorry for the kids who found her, and then I’d remember one of them was me.

  I couldn’t explain any of this to Mum so I got annoyed. ‘I Don’t Know.’

  Mum shook her head and looked unimpressed. No one had eaten her food. She stood up.

  ‘Bring some plates when you come will you.’

  Chapter 5

  ‘I don’t care what people say. I don’t think she slipped.’

  I groaned to myself. I really didn’t have the energy for this.

  It was Friday afternoon, a few hours after our session in the garden. Chess was sitting on the wooden bridge over the creek. The second wooden bridge. The one Debs had fallen off. She was dangling her feet, looking down into the water. I watched her from higher on the bank, up among the roots and vines.

  ‘No one wants to say it, but I think it’s quite conceivable that someone pushed her in. I can’t believe the police have stopped investigating.’

  ‘Look. Drop it, eh, Chess. This is Debs we’re talking about. She didn’t have enemies. Everyone liked her.’

  I felt a twinge of something. I couldn’t work out what. Quickly I pushed it away. I couldn’t think about Debbie today. After the week of feeling useless and helpless and hollow, and then feeling guilty about not feeling the right things, it had all become this huge weight, pushing me into the ground.

  Somewhere deep in my brain thoughts were trying to happen. All week I’d been woken up by dreams, not about Debs, about other things — skiing, and dancing in slow motion, and long dirt roads with trees leaning over them — but they’d all be overlaid somehow with the feel of a wet nylon shirt and firm cold rubbery flesh. And there’d been other dreams, too, about live people with blue-white faces.

  Now even the dreams had started to fade. If I could get some peace this afternoon I had a chance of a good night’s sleep.
I lay back on the bank and watched leaves and sky through half-shut eyelashes, trying to concentrate on the shifting lines of dark and light.

  Chess’s voice cut into my thinking, high and hard and nasal. ‘What if she knew something? You know, like someone’s evil secret or something.’

  Chess was never tired, or rather, when she was she got more and more wound up. I knew this about her and sometimes I even tried to understand, but today she disgusted me. She was actually enjoying herself. I’d seen it in the garden — that little excited light in her eyes. Chess saw this as a chance to be involved with the rest of us in something important. And now the others had gone, she only had me. Couldn’t she see how badly she was behaving, treating Debbie’s death like some kind of exciting puzzle? They might not have been bosom buddies, but for the past three years Debs had been serving Chess in the bakery and she’d always been pretty decent towards her. Couldn’t Chess at least pretend to be sad?

  Something was nagging at me. Debbie knew someone’s evil secret … Chess let the idea hang in the air long enough for me to remember, and then she spelled it out for me. ‘Before she died Debbie waved that necklace around and told us she knew three things. One was about the fire at Roland’s café. What could the others be?’

  No. No way. I wasn’t going to play. ‘I don’t know.’

  We had missed the last week of school, but it was still technically the start of summer holidays. Ahead of me were six weeks of slow days. I would lie around for days listening to Spotify and drawing on my eleven sketch pads. I’d sleep in because there’d be nothing to get up for, and eat too much out of sheer boredom. Chess wasn’t going to take that away from me. The funeral was over. Everything should return to normal.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Good old Matty Tingle. I had already got up early to go to the funeral, and now I was to have no peace. Chess had come to us for the afternoon. Her father was hitting the grog again, and I was expected to look after her. And of course, she hadn’t wanted to lie around. She never just lay around. She’d wanted to come down here.

  It wasn’t the place I minded. I wasn’t worried about Deb’s ghost popping out from behind a bush or anything. I was having flashbacks of the day we found her, but I had plenty of those wherever I was. In a way it was good to be here and see the real place, separated from town by trees, looking green and natural and a bit grotty the way it always did.

  I sighed. Chess didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was supposed to be nice. Well, I was doing my best. Lying around and mumbling things wasn’t that helpful, but it was better than getting the shits with her, and her conversation was, as usual, unbelievably annoying. I shut my eyes and let her rave on.

  ‘No scientist will accept a theory about something unless it covers all the facts. And if we say Debbie died by accident, there are a lot of things that are still unexplained.’

  She stopped and held up a hand, sticking out the thumb and first finger. ‘First unexplained item — the champagne. Why would she sit out the back of the bakery and drink it all by herself? And the bottle …’

  ‘How many things are there going to be?’

  She ignored me.

  ‘Not a single fingerprint on it. OK, people often rinse things out before they put them in the recycling and some people wash them in soap and water. But not even Debbie would wipe the outside so thoroughly.’

  I yawned. ‘She might.’

  ‘But it’s so unlikely. And with all the other unlikely things …’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Third unexplained thing — the necklace. The necklace has something to do with Debbie knowing people’s secrets. And it has gone missing. Now I saw the clasp and so did you. It wasn’t going to just break and fall into the creek. And it was too short to have been pulled off over Debbie’s head. She must have taken it off.’

  ‘What if she did?’

  ‘Well, if she took it off, then where is it? It couldn’t walk out of the bakery all by itself. Someone else must have been there and taken it away.’

  I scratched my nose and folded my arms across my chest.

  ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ said Chess.

  ‘No.’

  This wasn’t true. No matter how much I tried to deny it, it was starting to bother me.

  And Chess wasn’t going to let it go. ‘Come on Matt. The whole story is crazy. There’s a much more likely explanation for everything, just staring us in the face.’

  She wanted me to ask what it was, so I didn’t. But she went on anyway. ‘I think Deb had a companion to drink that wine. I think the companion let her drink most of the bottle. For some reason Deb gave that person the necklace. Then they went through the reserve to get to the church. At the creek, the companion persuaded her to go to the second bridge, for more of a chat. There Debbie either fell or she was pushed. It is possible it was an accident …’ She sounded a bit uncertain for a minute, then she got up to speed again.

  ‘But then that person went back and cleared away all trace of themselves from the bakery kitchen. So they must have also got the bakery keys. So I’d say in all probability that person is as guilty as anything.’

  She stopped. For a few more seconds I clung to my silence.

  This was more than Chess could take. ‘Come on, Matt. You’re the one who’s supposed to care about how people feel.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Everyone says one of the hardest things about Deb’s death is that no one knows exactly what happened.’

  ‘It is.’

  Now Chess started to sound a bit less sure of herself. ‘I want to ask you something. You have more of an idea about these things than me.’

  I lifted my head to look at her. Why was she flattering me now? What was she after?

  She said, ‘Do you think it would help Deb’s family if they knew exactly what happened — even if it was really awful?’

  Could it really be that Chess was finally starting to think about other people? It might be some kind of trick to get my attention, but there was nothing in her face like that. She looked worried. Suddenly I felt bad about the way I was treating her. I slid down to the bridge and sat next to her, trying to help. I even used her word.

  ‘It’s awful any way it happened. But, yeah, I reckon it would help if they knew. Even if the truth stinks, it’s better than not knowing. It kind of gives you a handle on things.’ I knew what I meant but it was hard to explain. ‘A mystery is so — nothing. If you have a fact, no matter how bad — well at least you know what it is you have to deal with.’

  Chess immediately latched on to this. ‘So it would be a good thing for us to look into it, wouldn’t it? Try to find out whether Deb really did fall off here or whether she was … assisted.’

  ‘I don’t see how —’

  ‘We could see people she knew. Ask questions.’

  I had to laugh at that. ‘No way.’

  ‘There are obvious places to start — the family. And the prime suspect has to be this boyfriend, Andrew. He was on the scene waiting for Debbie at the church. What if he met her at the bakery instead? Gave her wine? Took her down to the creek —’

  ‘Awww.’

  ‘She was murdered, Matt. Someone pushed her in.’

  ‘You don’t know that!’

  ‘OK, well here’s one more thing that doesn’t add up.’ She dropped off the bridge to the muddy water’s edge. Then, without warning, she reached down to the creek and madly splashed water all over the spot where she’d been sitting. Of course half of it went on me.

  ‘Chess! You are such a pain!’ I started brushing furiously at my clothes, pushing off some drops of water and rubbing most of them in. ‘Why do you have to be such a dickhead?!’

  Chess wasn’t worried. She’d splashed me with water before a million times and I only sounded half mad. She watched me with her hands on her hips and said, ‘It’s not slippery.’

  I was still shaking at my shirt. ‘What?’

  ‘Try it.’ She c
limbed back up and scuffed a foot back and forth on the bridge. ‘The big theory is that because it’d been raining Deb slipped on the bridge, but even when it’s wet, it’s not slippery.’

  Sulking, I climbed back up to my place on the bank and lay down again.

  There were a few moments of silence. But my hassles weren’t over. Chess joined me on the bank, sitting up straight, making me wish I wasn’t lying down.

  ‘I mean maybe she just walked off the edge, but again it seems unlikely with a handrail along one side, even if she had drunk a lot.’

  Walked off the edge. The words sent a hard tight feeling right around my skull. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was connected to something huge, some timeless empty space that I couldn’t quite imagine. Just for a second I felt immensely sad, and afraid. And then it was gone.

  In one of the trees a pair of black cockatoos were jumping around, getting over-excited about the summer. They took off suddenly, sending a rustling movement through the branches. A few leaves drifted slowly down.

  Chess gave up waiting for an answer and went off into one of her mini mental attacks. Not a screaming fit or anything. Chess’s mental attacks are very quiet, but they do mean something is getting to her. She starts whispering to herself, very fast, so that you can’t understand the words, as if she was possessed or something. She draws invisible diagrams on her knees. Today she was also counting things off on her finger tips. She never did any of this when there were people around, apart from me, which is just as well. She’d be whacked straight into a loony bin.

  Mutter, mutter, scribble, scratch. What was she doing? Was she still counting things that didn’t fit? It amazed me that she could be thinking clearly about Debbie at all. To me everything was just an ugly blur. Tara and Wando were like me. They’d acted weirdly this morning, but that was what they were supposed to do. That was human — to go tense and quiet when things turn bad. It was this little pocket calculator beside me who was the freak.

  Finally she looked around her and took a deep breath. ‘Could we go?’ she said.

  I sat up, relieved, thinking instantly of my bed and my Juice magazine.